Drawn & Quarterly – serie

Hello students, meet Professor Skeletor. Be on time, don t miss class, and turn off your phones. No time for introductions, we start drawing right away. The goal is more rock, less talk, and we communicate only through images. For more than five years the cartoonist Lynda Barry has been an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin Madison art department and at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, teaching students from all majors, both graduate and undergraduate, how to make comics, how to be creative, how to not think. There is no academic lecture in this classroom. Doodling is enthusiastically encouraged. Making Comics is the follow-up to Barry s bestselling Syllabus and this time she shares all of her comics-making exercises. In a new hand drawn syllabus detailing her creative curriculum, Barry has students drawing themselves as monsters and superheroes, convincing students who think they can t draw that they can, and most important, encouraging them to understand that a daily journal can be anything so long as it is hand drawn. Barry teaches all students and believes everyone and anyone can be creative. At the core of Making Comics is her certainty that creativity is vital to processing the world around us.

As springtime dawns in Moominvalley and the first northern crocus opens, Moominpappa and Snorkmaiden, glamourised by the prospects of movie stars and gambling, insist the whole family take a trip down to the Riviera. Reluctantly Moomin and Moominmamma agree to go along, and the Moomins set off on a grand adventure, complete with butlers, luxury shops, indoor swimming pools, and duels at dawn. With their innocent curiosity about everything, the Moomins prove the perfect foil for the cynical, world-weary residents of the Riviera. Moomin on the Riviera is a classic Moomin story reworked in full colour. A delight for the whole family!

Elise Gravel is back with a whimsical look at one of her family s most beloved pastimes: mushroom hunting! Combining her love of exploring nature with her talent for anthropomorphizing everything, she takes us on a magical tour of the forest floor and examines a handful of her favorite alien specimens up close. While the beautiful coral mushroom looks like it belongs under the sea, the peculiar Lactarius indigo may be better suited for outer space. From the fun-to-stomp puffballs to the prince of the stinkers?the stinkhorn mushroom?and the musically inclined chanterelles, Gravel shares her knowledge of this fascinating kingdom by bringing each species to life in full felt-tip-marker glory. The Governor General Award winning author Gravel s first book with Drawn and Quarterly, If Found . . . Please Return to Elise Gravel, was a Junior Library Guild selection and an instant hit among librarians, parents, and kids alike. Fostering the same spirit of creativity and curiosity, The Mushroom Fan Club promises to inspire kids to look more closely at the world around them and to seek out all of life s little treasures, stinky or not!

Lynda Barry s bestselling treatise on creativity, What It Is, is now available in paperback. How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? What is an image? What is the past? For decades, these questions have permeated the pages of Lynda Barry s compositions, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. Barry s What It Is demonstrates a tried-and-true creative method that is playful, powerful, and accessible to anyone with an inquisitive mind who wishes to write or to remember. In this exploratory workbook, confessional, and memoir each page is a full-color collage that is a gentle guide to the creative process packed full of swirling collaged images with pen and ink drawings on Barry s signature legal paper. Barry s award winning book is an invigorating example of exactly what it is: The ordinary is extraordinary.

The post-alien abduction trauma memoir we ve all been waiting for. 'Ah, there s that famous lip quiver!' says Jackie s abductor and student. Jackie has been determined to be the saddest living person in the entire world by a mysterious team of alien abductors. His earthly musical celebrity is nothing compared to his emotional superstar status in the eyes of these curious and peculiar shape-shifters. Jackie is forced to perform his sadness over and over again on command, so his captors can study and master this very puzzling, very human emotion. Until just like that, Jackie is returned to his old life. Trying to comprehend what has happened, he joins a support group. It s a sea of conspiracy theorists, emotional vampires, and simpatico real abductees. As each person tells their story, he realizes he may never know. Holy Lacrimony is classic DeForge oscillating between shockingly dirty, casually funny and earnestly engaged in the socio-politics of his fictive worlds. Part abstract shape blending and part hieroglyphic storytelling, each image is a discrete and tightly designed object of beauty that never loses the forward motion of the best personal cartooning. DeForge continues to prove that he s the single most innovative and empathetic cartoonist in the past twenty years.